The U.S. government is offering use of one of the world’s most powerful computers for projects that improve American competitiveness.

The IBM BlueGene/Q Vulcan on offer is located in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. The computer has 400,000 compute cores and can perform five quadrillion floating point operations per second.

The lab has historically worked with companies in the aerospace, automotive, defense, energy, healthcare, manufacturing and transportation industries, but on less powerful high-performance computing systems.

The announcement comes as Canada’s federal government shuffles its cabinet, bringing aboard a third Industry Minister, James Moore, since a federal digital strategy was promised in 2010, aimed at similar competitiveness goals. The strategy remains undelivered, though recently departed Industry Minister Christian Paradis twice promised to deliver it before the end of 2012.